


i wear glasses (so that i can see you better)

by eddiekissbrak



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, stanley uris lives (he's never mentioned but i need everyone to know that he's alive)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:28:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22980991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eddiekissbrak/pseuds/eddiekissbrak
Summary: Eddie didn’t even mean to move in. It just seemed like the natural progression of things, you know?
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 35
Kudos: 353





	i wear glasses (so that i can see you better)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [richiebeepbeep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/richiebeepbeep/gifts).



> this is a birthday gift for miss mickey, who i GUESS i think is kinda alright.

Eddie didn’t even mean to move in. It just seemed like the natural progression of things, you know? First, defeat an evil alien demon with six of your closest friends (and one very angry Patty, who had to save her husband from involuntary clown-assisted suicide); second, take one look at the town that fostered both the best and worst times of your childhood you now suddenly remember and immediately call your wife to inform her you are and always have been irrevocably gay; third, make that wife your ex-wife. Fourth, immediately find yourself homeless and call upon your best friend Richie Tozier to help you find a new place, argue for two hours over the pros and/or cons of dropping thousands of dollars on a new place in New York, and hang up halfway through the seventh _your mom_ joke Richie’s told, eyes glued to the online receipt for the one-way ticket to Los Angeles you’ve just purchased. 

See? Natural progression. 

Eddie arrives at LAX on a Tuesday morning with a modest four suitcases rolling behind him and his double-sized fanny pack strapped securely to his hip. 

“I think the rest of your white suburban family is looking for you, dude,” Richie says, eyes trailing from the neat robin’s egg collar of Eddie’s polo to the comfortable (but nearing orthopedic) dad shoes that tapped impatiently against the floor. “Everybody better hide your minivans!” 

“You better hide that big-ass forehead,” Eddie volleys, and the crackle of surprised laughter is well worth the fact he just quoted Fast & Furious. “Help me with my bags, asshole. And hello to you too.”

“Even after a nine-hour flight, Eds still gets off a good one.” Richie bumps his shoulder against Eddie’s as he wrestles two of the suitcases away. “Christ dude, what’s in here? How much do your grandpa shoes weigh?”

“They are not grandpa shoes.”

“You’re forty years old and wearing white rubber blocks as sneakers.”

“They support my arch. And they’re comfortable!”

“Okay, grandpa.” 

Eddie shoves Richie to the side — maybe he spends a second too long crowded into Richie’s space before he tugs his rolling luggage across the linoleum floors, but neither of them say anything about it. They just launch right back into bickering, all the way through the airport, all the way through the parking lot, and all the way through struggling to fit all four of Eddie’s overstuffed bags into Richie’s compensation convertible. 

“What the fuck would I be compensating for, huh, Eds?”

“For your tiny dick, asshole, I don’t know.” Eddie throws his entire weight against the bag wedged between the car door and the leather seat. “And don’t call me Eds. Can’t you drive something normal?” 

“It’s L.A! This is normal!” 

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Conformist.”

“You drove a fucking Escalade, man!” Richie wipes his forearm across the glistening sweat in his hairline and Eddie quickly looks at the squashed yogurt cup under the car beside them. “In New York City!” 

“That’s — fuck you!” 

“You can’t just say fuck you every time you don’t have a come back.”

“Fuck you!”

They leave two of Eddie’s suitcases in the parking lot. It’s L.A. — he can buy new clothes. 

* * *

Eddie didn’t mean to start sleeping in Richie’s bed. It just seemed like the natural progression of things, you know? First you move in to the guest bedroom, all of your clothes hung neatly and your toiletries stacked label-forward in the bathroom; second, you start having vivid, stomach churning nightmares of rotten, black vomit leaking out of your mouth and out of your chest — visions of your friends dying and the sharp glint of rusted and silvered metal; third, find yourself sweaty and hyperventilating in Richie’s doorway at three in the morning, unsure why it feels so much safer to keep your inhaler on _his_ nightstand instead of yours. Fourth, repeat steps two and three until one night, after you both finish brushing your teeth, Richie stops you before you can head back to the guest room by saying: 

“I get them too, you know.” His words are a little mangled, talking as he half-assedly flosses. (Eddie was pretty sure Richie had never flossed a day in his life before Eddie showed up in his home, and he still doesn’t seem to like it much, but he does seem to like listening to Eddie’s pro-flossing speeches.) “The nightmares.” 

Eddie is still where he stands in the doorway. “A lot?”

“Yeah.” Richie hooks the floss around another tooth. “Almost every night since… fuck, I dunno. As long as I can remember.” 

Eddie doesn’t know if his restless nights the past twenty years were Pennywise’s fault or had more to do with the loveless marriage he hid behind. It’s still somehow comforting to hear he’s not alone in this; even in the darkness, Richie’s hand would always find Eddie’s. His shoulders drop, just a bit.

“So they don’t go away?” 

“Oh, they go away. If you do enough coke or drink enough Jack you’ll pass out so hard not even your ghosts can find you.” The lilt in Richie’s tone suggests he’s joking, but Eddie’s seen the tabloid headlines and pictures of “Trashmouth Tozier” vomiting outside of Hollywood bars that suggest Richie has been running from his past even when he didn’t understand what he was running from. Richie spits into the sink, saliva tinted soft crimson. “Eugh. See? My gums only do that when I floss!” 

“Your gums do that because you don’t floss. You’ve gotta strengthen — your dad is a dentist, shouldn’t you know how to —” 

“My dad _was_ a dentist, he just sits in the park and does sudoku now— and if you think I did any more than the bare minimum of dental care at any point in my life you already think too much of me.” 

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Are you gonna rinse out the sink or just let that shit harden onto the porcelain, huh?” 

Richie mocks Eddie under his breath but he rinses it out, making sure to spray Eddie with a healthy amount of water when he shakes his hands dry. 

“Cut it out, asshole!” Richie doesn’t cut it out; in fact, he gets his hands wet again and wipes them all over Eddie’s shirt, and hair, and anywhere else he can access as Eddie squirms and laughs and tries to push him off. “You’re gonna get me so wet I’ll have to change!” 

“Crazy,” Richie says, a little out of breath from their scuffle. “That’s almost exactly what your mom said to me last—”

Eddie cups a hand under the tap and flings it at Richie, who splutters and chokes dramatically as droplets fly into his open mouth. Eddie wheezes with laughter — until Richie lifts the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe across his face. Dark curls spread over a broad chest, dark curls trail down his stomach, dark curls that get darker and thicker where the blue striped pajama pants hang too low on Richie’s hips; Eddie had come to terms with the fact that he wanted Richie to fuck him six ways to Sunday the minute he’d walked into Jade of the Orient, but coming face to face with bare chest and low-slung pants like this was enough to send Eddie into a second existential crisis.

“That’s what you get, dickwad.” His voice only cracks a little bit, trance broken when Richie’s ‘ _Check Meow-t_ ’ shirt falls back into place. Richie’s looking at Eddie funny, eyes curious and calculating, and Eddie’s cheeks flush up against his will. “What? Shut up. I’m going to bed.”

“Doesn’t always have to be drugs and alcohol, though.” Richie’s not looking at Eddie anymore. “The nightmares are uh. They’re usually better when someone else is in bed with me.” 

Eddie chooses to ignore the bubbling thoughts of Richie in bed with other people. “What do you—”

“I dunno. Something about not being alone, you know?” 

Eddie nods slowly. Richie stares at him, eyebrow raised; Eddie stares back. 

“I’m saying — just — well, you can stay with me, if you want.” Nervous hands adjust permanently lop-sided glasses. “I’ve got a California King — thought it’d be fitting, you know — but it’s huge, or whatever, so there’s plenty of space. It’ll be like the sleepovers we had as kids.” 

“What, like you’re gonna wake me up at 3am with a whoopie cushion right next to my ear?”

Richie snorts. “Don’t give me any ideas.” 

The tap is still running. The ground around them — as well as the walls, and the counter, and even the mirror — is covered in splashes of water. Eddie and Richie are staring at each other again, a tension between them that’s been growing since… well. Maybe the tension has always been there between them; maybe it just took awhile to figure out what it meant. 

Eddie clears his throat and turns off the tap. “Yeah that would be… that would be nice.”

Richie offers Eddie a dry shirt, and not even the tacky print can put Eddie off from tugging it on. The fabric hangs off his small frame, baggy and soft, and Eddie just barely catches the way Richie stares at Eddie’s exposed collarbone. 

He wants to live in the heat of Richie’s gaze for the rest of his life. 

“It’s— you look— goodnight, Eds.” Richie swallows whatever bravery he’d worked up and flips the lights off before cannonballing into the bed. Eddie follows, his smile hidden by the darkness as he crawls under the covers. “And please don’t snore too loud; I’m a delicate sleeper.” 

“ _Please_. I can hear your lawnmower lungs from the guest bedroom every night.” 

“Surely I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richie sniffs. “That must be someone else.” 

“Goodnight, Richie.”

There’s a shuffle as they both get comfortable beneath the blankets; Eddie might be hallucinating, but he’s pretty sure he can feel Richie’s hand tentatively reach out to rest between them. Sometimes, bravery lives in the dark; Eddie’s hesitation dies fast and his own cautious hand draws up slowly, until their fingertips brush under the safety of cold sheets. 

“Goodnight, Eds.”

Neither of them have nightmares that night.

*******

The one night sleepover becomes two, and then three, and then Eddie loses count. Every night Richie offers the left side of his bed, and every night Eddie accepts. The guest bedroom becomes a guest bedroom once more. 

Nothing past that changes, not really. They’re still just Richie and Eddie, Eddie and Richie: they bicker in all the different restaurants Richie shows him around LA, they bicker on the oversized beach towels as Richie avoids Eddie’s sprayable sunscreen, and they bicker when they’re just laying around on the big couches of Richie’s air-conditioned home. They bicker and laugh and it’s _normal_ — nothing’s changed. 

Except. 

Except their shared looks get longer, and Richie’s always been touchy with Eddie but now it feels like he never stops. Not that Eddie really wants him to, it’s just that every time Richie puts one of his big arms around Eddie’s shoulders or puts one of his strong hands on Eddie’s knee, Eddie feels like his body is gonna vibrate right out of his fucking skin. The other day Richie came up behind Eddie while he was cooking (burning) fajitas for dinner and the heat of all 6”1’ of Richie’s body nearly pressed against Eddie’s back was enough to distract him so badly he burned two of his fingers on the stove top. 

Like, he’s fine, but Richie’s going to fucking kill him. It’s fine!

There is one thing Eddie finds weird about sleeping with Richie — well, one _additional_ thing. The guy sleeps with his fucking glasses on. Like, full-on, face pressed into the pillow with lenses hanging on for dear life as Richie tosses and turns, kind of sleep. Eddie’s positive that EyeBuyDirect is getting half of Richie’s paycheck by now, what with all the replacement pairs he’s bought in the past few months. 

“You’re gonna break those,” Eddie says one night, the glow of L.A seeping through the blinds and casting rigid shadows over their soft forms hidden beneath the blankets. “Again.”

“Yep.” Richie’s eyes are closed; he’d said goodnight over ten minutes ago now, but Eddie’s too jazzed up from the slide of their legs entangled together to fall asleep. “Do you have suggestions for the next pair?”

“If you stopped wearing them to sleep you wouldn’t have to keep buying new ones.” He thinks for a second. “Big round pink ones. Like Elton John.” 

Richie cracks an eye open. “You think I could pull those off?”

“No,” Eddie lies. “But I’d like to see you try.” 

Richie eyes are closed again, but he manages to smack Eddie’s hand away with perfect aim when Eddie reaches for the glasses. The faintest smile plays at Richie’ lips. 

“I wear them to see you better.” 

“It’s fucking night time, Richie.” 

“Good point; let’s sleep.” 

Eddie tries to snatch the glasses again, but Richie’s eyes snap open and he catches Eddie’s wrist in mid-air. 

“What’s it matter to you?”

“I’m just curious,” Eddie grumbles, but it’s half-assed and all-bark. Richie’s rubbing his thumb in circles against Eddie’s wrist now, soft and soothing. It’s… overwhelmingly tender for two guys who still claim they’re nothing but good bros. 

“I like that you’re the last thing I see at night instead of fuckin’ blurry shapes,” Richie says after awhile. “I don’t know, man. It’s just nice. It’s real.” Adjusted to the darkness, Eddie can see the cut of Richie’s stubbled jaw moving against his blue pillowcase as he talks. “After everything… after Pennywise… Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s really _real_. You know?” 

Eddie nods even though Richie’s not looking at him. He does know. The mere existence of IT was enough to shatter their fragile hold on reality as kids, and then to have it all come flying back at them thirty years later… When your world is flipped like that, it’s difficult to trust your eyes again, no matter how long it’s been. Eddie still half expects drains to start whispering to him again, or to wake up one morning and find himself still married to Myra. He’s not sure if that will ever stop. 

“I know.” 

“I like knowing you’re real,” Richie says, words muffled against the fabric of his pillow. 

“I like knowing you’re real too,” Eddie says, words muffled around the meteor in his chest. 

Eddie never makes comments about the glasses again, but he does pick out some horrendously ugly pairs when Richie’s black ones finally snap.

* * *

Eddie didn’t mean to fall in love — then again, maybe that’s just the natural progression of things with Eddie and Richie, isn’t it? First, you move in with the catalyst of your gay awakening; second, fall asleep together every night, starting on opposite sides of the bed and waking wrapped up in each other’s arms (or, because life has never been a rom-com, wake up with Richie’s body starfished over the entire bed and his massive arm securely across your chest); third, realize that you’re not actively falling in love, but that you’re already in love, and you have been since you first heard Richie Tozier’s god awful British guy impression; fourth, have sex in the kitchen.

Okay, definitely skipped a few steps on that one. 

There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that night. It’s Tuesday, which means Richie’s got on his Ratatouille apron as he makes the weekly SpaghEddie — _sigh_ — and Eddie’s stuck listening to the same loop of an obnoxious opera rendition of Dean Martin’s _That’s Amore_ while he washes all the dishes Richie creates.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary, but something about the way Richie sings into his wooden spoon, something about the way he accidentally flicks specks of sauce onto Eddie’s face, something about the way he licks his thumb and then swipes it over the soft skin of Eddie’s cheek so slow and meaningful it makes Eddie’s knees start to buckle — something about that makes Eddie snap. Something about it makes him grab Richie’s face with both soapy hands and bring him into a crushing kiss.

And now Eddie’s staring up at Richie, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, chest heaving as soapy water drips down his forearms and onto the floor. 

“Uh,” Eddie says, and he starts to pull away at the same time Richie says “I love you.”

Sometimes bravery lives in the dark, but sometimes bravery lives in the mirror on Richie’s chest. “I love you too.” 

“I love you,” Richie says again, and when he says it the third time his voice breaks. When he says it the fourth, Eddie laughs, but only so he doesn’t cry.

“You already said that.”

“I know. I’m making up for the 40 years I couldn’t.” 

They don’t talk much after that. 

Later, after the smoke alarm goes off half-way through the best sex of Eddie’s life (not like he has anything to compare it to, but Jesus Christ if he’d known it would feel like that… if he’d known Richie’s dick was as massive as he’d joked his whole life… well, he doesn’t know what he would’ve done — he’s still in shock), after Eddie forces Richie to clean the burnt sauce encrusted on the pan, after they’ve ordered post-sex pizza (and had post-sex-pizza sex), they both fall into bed, exhausted. For the first time since Eddie’s moved in, they don’t bother starting on opposite sides of the bed. Instead, Richie pushes himself into Eddie’s space as soon as the lights are off and curves himself into Eddie’s little spoon.

“I’m gonna tell the others you like being the little spoon,” Eddie says. He hopes Richie can’t feel his heart rocketing back and forth against his rib cage, and then he remembers he had Richie’s dick in his ass earlier and decides it’s useless to pretend Richie doesn’t have such an effect on him. 

“Do it, I don’t care. No shame about little spooning it up, Eds.” Richie wiggles as he snuggles back even more, and Eddie pinches his waist because as fun as the last two rounds were, he doesn’t have the stamina to try a third. “No shame.”

Eddie almost tests that theory — gets as far as snapping a picture and everything — before deciding he doesn’t want to hear the various _I knew it’d happen eventually_ ’s from the group chat. Eventually they would have to tell the Losers something, especially since Bev and Ben were coming to stay with them for Easter in a few weeks, but for now, they could all wait. For now, Eddie would live completely selfishly in Richie’s love. 

Eddie’s already drifting off when Richie nudges him. “Hey.” 

“Huh?” His eyes flutter open, fighting against the sleep that tugs at his consciousness. “What?”

Richie adjusts his glasses and looks. Just… looks. “Just making sure you’re real,” he murmurs. And then he smiles. 

When Eddie falls asleep, he dreams of green eyes and big, goofy, _real_ love. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
